actually were on this confused earth, and not turning aside because things were not as they ought to be.  Thus many a battle and campaign had been saved, and so inland navigation played its part now.  It helped, among other things, to bring Maryland and Virginia together, and their combination was the first step toward the Constitution of the United States.  There is nothing fanciful in all this.  No one would pretend that the Constitution of the United States was descended from Washington’s James River and Potomac River companies.  But he worked at them with that end in view, and so did what was nearest to his hand and most practical toward union, empire, and the development of national sentiment.

Ah, says some critic in critic’s fashion, you are carried away by your subject; you see in a simple business enterprise, intended merely to open western lands, the far-reaching ideas of a statesman.  Perhaps our critic is right, for as one goes on living with this Virginian soldier, studying his letters and his thoughts, one comes to believe many things of him, and to detect much meaning in his sayings and doings.  Let us, however, show our evidence at least.  Here is what he wrote to his friend Humphreys a year after his scheme was afoot:  “My attention is more immediately engaged in a project which I think big with great political as well as commercial consequences to the States, especially the middle ones;” and then he went on to argue the necessity of fastening the Western States to the Atlantic seaboard and thus thwarting Spain and England.  This looks like more than a money-making scheme; in fact, it justifies all that has been said, especially if read in connection with certain other letters of this period.  Great political results, as well as lumber and peltry, were what Washington intended to float along his rivers and canals.

In this same letter to Humphreys he touched also on another point in connection with the development of the West, which was of vast importance to the future of the country, and was even then agitating men’s minds.  He said:  “I may be singular in my ideas, but they are these:  that, to open a door to, and make easy the way for those settlers to the westward (who ought to advance regularly and compactly), before we make any stir about the navigation of the Mississippi, and before our settlements are far advanced towards that river, would be our true line of policy.”  Again he wrote:  “However singular the opinion may be, I cannot divest myself of it, that the navigation of the Mississippi, at this time [1785], ought to be no object with us.  On the contrary, until we have a little time allowed to open and make easy the ways between the Atlantic States and the western territory, the obstructions had better remain.”  He was right in describing himself as “singular” in his views on this matter, which just then was exciting much attention.